


Common Blue Violet

by liminalweirdo



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Hanahaki Disease, M/M, Protective Shane Madej, Soft Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-08
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:20:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29929881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liminalweirdo/pseuds/liminalweirdo
Summary: [Dude, I think I might be dying] he texts Shane. It’s mostly a joke. Mostly.Shane, of course, is already awake because he’s some kind of freak. [Uh oh.] followed almost immediately by [What do you want on your tombstone, buddy?]ORJust days after Ryan and Shane come back from a haunted location in Japan, Ryan starts coughing up flower petals.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 26
Kudos: 125





	Common Blue Violet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [vigilaunt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/vigilaunt/gifts).



> I have only ever glimpsed into the world of _hanahaki_ in fic. When I wrote this piece, I was interested in the violence behind the beauty, as well as the language of flowers and plants, and I hope it didn't turn out too visceral or ugly. My main reference was _Flowerpaedia: 1000 flowers and their meanings_ by Cheralyn Darcey. _Hanahaki_ is such an intriguing concept, and so I hope I did it justice.

People weren’t joking when they said that spiritual energy was just stronger in older countries. All those stories about spectral passengers in Japan after the Tōhoku earthquake — taxi drivers picking up passengers only to find that they had disappeared…

Because it’s Japan, the drivers take their disappearing passengers to their destinations anyway. You never know what might sit in shadows, and those seacoast roads are dark at night. And besides, maybe the ghosts are just trying to get home.

Ryan and Shane had ventured all the way out to Honshu, Japan for the newest season of Supernatural — a little self-indulgent, if Ryan’s honest, but he likes learning about the different parts of his culture, and it’s not like Shane wasn’t on board. Also the food. Jesus christ almighty, the _food_. Even in LA Ryan misses it constantly. Still, he is thankful to be back home, because _boy_ was that the longest plane ride he has _ever_ been on.)

It’s only a couple of days after they get back, though, that the traveler’s fatigue or something hits him hard. He wakes up too early — early enough that the sun is still hiding behind the corner of his building, throwing this intense orange-like-fire glare onto the windows of the high rise across the street. Ryan squints at them as he sits up in bed and thinks he feels like shit, chest aching in the way it sometimes does when he’s run too hard for too long. Kind of like a chest cold, but when he coughs nothing comes up, so… that’s weird. He doesn’t have that congested feeling when he inhales, and his heartbeat feels normal. Your heartbeat would change for a heart attack. Right?

<Dude, I think I might be dying> he texts Shane. It’s mostly a joke. Mostly. 

Shane, of course, is already awake because he’s some kind of freak. <Uh oh.> followed almost immediately by <What do you want on your tombstone, buddy?> and Ryan smiles down hard at his phone despite himself.

Ryan:  
<Gonna google it.>

Shane:  
<THAT’S what you want on your tombstone?>  
<Oh, smart. Definitely do that.>

Ryan breathes a laugh as Shane’s texts come up. He doesn’t Google it. It’s probably just some kind of virus from all that recycled plane air or something. He could also just be fucking _tired_. 

Ryan:  
<He’s a ghost now.>  
<For my tombstone.>

Shane:  
<You’re gonna have to find another funeral planner, pal.>  
<GHOSTS AREN’T REAL.>

“Eh, fuck you,” Ryan says good-naturedly, and tosses it onto the bed. He rubs his palm over his chest through his t-shirt, then rolls out of bed and shuffles out to the kitchen to get some tea.

The tea helps, he thinks. He even gets some editing done, leaning over his knees at his coffee table, glasses on and software open. He still likes to do the Unsolved stuff himself. There’s just something… nostalgic about it or something. And also, he… 

Well, he likes watching Shane. Likes a reason to watch Shane that feels purposeful. He isn’t just going to sit around and watch all of their episodes all day long; he was there. At least if he’s editing he has a _purpose_ , right? A reason to be staring. To pull the footage back and watch the same five seconds over and over. He’s just lining up the sound, he tells himself. Just adjusting the music. He’s just watching the way Shane laughs at something he’s said, again and again; that good, surprised laugh that Ryan loves so much, the one that comes over his face like a flashbulb. Sometimes he wonders how other people don’t seem to notice it — how other people in the room don’t stop and stare, because it’s _blinding_ to Ryan.

He kind of didn’t expect this to go on for so long.

He hadn’t really known, when he’d asked Shane to co-host the show with him, way back when they still worked for Buzzfeed, what _this_ was going to become. He _still_ doesn’t know when his heart or his brain crossed the line from admiration for Shane — he was really good at editing, good at sound, he had a good, easy camera presence, and he was _fun to be around_ — when all that started to become something… bigger, for Ryan. He couldn’t pinpoint it. Thought maybe… maybe when they filmed that D.B. Cooper episode. He remembers telling himself that clothes he’d chosen and the weird, giddy nerves he had were because it was sponsored, and he’d wanted to make a good impression, but he knows, now, it was because of Shane. Because Shane had told him, once, in passing, that he looked ‘nice in grey’ and Ryan’s brain had fucking short-circuited beneath the sun at high noon, their lunches in styrofoam takeout between them on the picnic table outside their work. 

He went back, once. (Once). All the way back to re-watch _The Mysterious Disappearance of the Sodder Children_ and just— he marvels, a little, at how… maybe, obvious? It is. How obvious he was. How he leaned away from Shane like it was just too much to be near him. Ryan watches the video and notes how many times his eyes flicker in Shane’s direction, how many times his words tangle up in his mouth, and feels his stomach flip, even now, even _years_ later. He remembers how badly he’d wanted Shane to like him, which was stupid, because Shane already liked him. They were friends. But it was more than that. He wanted Shane to thinks Ryan was funny. He wanted Shane to…

Maybe just look at him more? In a ratio of how much they look at one another in this episode, Ryan thinks it’s probably like a 90% Ryan, 10% Shane. Shane does what he’s supposed to do — Shane looks at the camera while Ryan— while Ryan fucking looks at Shane.

And so Ryan had stopped the video at the eight minute mark and tries not to wonder if Shane ever does this — if he ever goes back and revisits their old footage with his heart in his mouth like Ryan does.

 _Probably not_ , Ryan thinks. After all, they’re just friends. It’s why Shane can tell him he loves him so easily. It’s not… it’s love, but it’s not…

It’s not love like Ryan’s is. And, hey, that’s okay, Ryan thinks. He’s not hurting anyone, if he indulges himself in Shane’s smile or Shane’s soft voice while he does the editing. He’s not hurting anyone, and he’s not going to sabotage their friendship or make anything awkward, and they can just… be like how they always are, which is totally enough for Ryan.

It’s just that he has to remind himself of that a little more often these days.

~°~

A week later, nothing has changed. If anything, Ryan feels _worse,_ and it’s strange because his throat doesn’t hurt. In fact, it’s nothing like it normally is when he gets a bad cold. He doesn’t have a headache, he’s not sneezing. It’s just this strange, almost burning feeling in his chest; worse when he exhales. He figures if it’s still like this by the time he wakes up tomorrow, he’ll go to the doctor.

Sometime before dawn he wakes up coughing. A horrible, painful cough that shakes his bones. He coughs until he’s gagging into his hand, but nothing comes up. Not even a glass of water helps. Finally, Ryan does Google, shaking with anxiety. And he’s getting all kinds of things: asthma, bronchitis, heartburn… — it’s definitely not heartburn. And then the scarier stuff. Heart attack, aortic dissection, what even _is_ that? 

He’s searching ‘how long can a heart attack last?’ trying to convince himself that that’s not what’s happening when the coughing starts again, this low, long hacking cough. He goes through his cupboards for the NyQuil and then holds the bottle in his hand, standing frozen in the too-bright fluorescents of his kitchen at three in the morning thinking _What if I take this, and it really is a heart attack, and then I just fall asleep and die? Oh, shit…_

He thinks about texting Shane. He thinks about calling his mom. He’s overcome with another fit of coughing that has him gagging and spitting over the side of the kitchen sink until his stomach hurts, but it’s all just saliva and bile. He looks up at the clock with watery eyes and blinks until he can make out the time. He thinks _three hours ’til morning_. And his phone tells him that it’s five hours until the nearest Walk-In Centre opens. He could, he thinks, drive to Urgent Care. Or he could just take some medicine and hope for the best…

No, that’s fucking stupid.

Ryan pulls on his jean jacket, grabs his car keys, wallet, phone and heads out into the hazed darkness of Los Angeles at night. It’s a soft dark, in the city. A dark that turns formidable and enormous the further into the desert you go, where there is, somewhere, staggering starlight. Ryan, for his part, drives into the city. Into the neon and orange, into a sea of red taillights, even at this hour.

He sits in Urgent Care for hours. It’s a little brick building with green madder growing around its perimeter, tucked between tucked between a laundromat and a Sylvan learning centre which looks like it closed down a decade ago. Ryan coughs and coughs and coughs into his sleeve and into the collar of his jacket — coughs into his hands and he is so, so tired. He thinks about texting Shane. He holds his phone in his hands and scrolls through instagram, scrolls through his texts, scrolls through his messages to Shane’s name again and again, but typing <Hey, I’m in Urgent Care> at six in the fucking morning feels a bit overdramatic.

And then, finally, Ryan’s shaking lungs produce _something_. And god, he hopes maybe it’s a hair or dust or maybe even the fruit sticker off of a pear he ate too fast but what he finds in his hand in the sleepy waiting room is something… something horribly dark, rolled up like an insect, and Ryan’s stomach _lurches_ in terror. He lurches up from his seat and goes into the little bathroom off the waiting room where he locks the door behind himself and rushes to the sink where, wide-eyed, he cautiously pokes at the dark cylindrical thing that’s lying in his shaking palm.

It unrolls, little by little, sticking like wet paper… into a flower petal. “What the fuck? What the _fuck_?”

He’s about to wash it down the drain when he remembers that he’s at the doctor’s office for a reason. Instead, he carefully deposits into a piece of paper towel from the dispenser and, folding it up like some kind of fucked up love letter, he tucks it into his pocket and washes his hands. He thinks, for a moment, that maybe that’s it. That he _somehow_ swallowed _that_ , and he’ll be fine now, but by the time he’s splashed his face with cold water to calm down, and dried his hands off, he’s got that itch again, that _ache_ , and he coughs his way back into the waiting room.

He pulls out his phone and, to Shane he writes <Dude, I> but then the nurse calls his name, and Ryan leaves the text unfinished — sitting unsent as he pockets his phone and follows her in.

~°~

“You must have swallowed it, somehow. Have you been eating flowers?” the doctor asks. Maybe he's trying to be funny. He’s younger than Ryan’s used to, in his late thirties, maybe. 

Dutifully, Ryan laughs. “Uh, no. I have no idea how I could've... inhaled that, or swallowed it or whatever."

The petal sits on the paper towel on the counter between them.

“Well… I really don’t know. There’s nothing physically wrong with you other than the coughing?”

“Um, my chest hurts. Like a burning?”

“What’s your diet like? Do you eat a lot of spicy foods?”

“Oh— yeah, no, I’ve had heartburn before, it’s not. It’s definitely not that. This, like, _really_ hurts. It's like... I thought I was having a heart attack.”

“Well, your blood pressure and heart rate are normal.”

They look at each other. Ryan feels at sea. “I—” he begins. “Uh… okay, so what… what should I do?”

“I would take an antacid and just make sure to stay hydrated. You probably managed to swallow this somehow, and your esophagus is just a little bit irritated now. Why don’t you go home and drink some water — eat soft, bland foods for a few days, just go easy on your system and uh… if it’s still there in three to five days, you can come back here and we’ll do some bloodwork, okay?”

“Will— would bloodwork find anything?”

“It could.”

“I don’t mind doing it now,” Ryan says. “Just to get it out of the way.”

The doctor waffles silently, staring at the flower petal in the napkin. “I don’t think that’s necessary at this point.”

Ryan stares, quietly. His chest burns and burns and burns. Suddenly he feels like crying. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Thanks. Thank you.”

He gets up to go, half-reaching for the flower petal without thinking. 

“I’ll take care of this,” the doctor says, and sweeps it directly into the trash can.

“Okay,” Ryan hears himself say again. He makes his way, in a daze, back out to the parking lot where he stands in the morning sun and panics, panics. He pulls out his phone and there’s a text from Shane already that reads: <Are you dead yet?>

<Dude the weirdest thing just…> Ryan starts, but then… then he calls him, shaking fingers fumbling for his headphones. He feels too keyed up to drive so he just sits down on a stone enclosure that surrounds a bed of narcissus. He thinks better of his proximity to flowers as the phone rings and moves away to sit down on the curb several feet away, next to a still-closed laundromat, which feels safer.

“Heyyy” Shane says as he picks up, voice swinging into this lackadaisical cowboy tone that makes Ryan laugh in spite of himself.

“Hey,” Ryan says, and hears it come out, dull and listless.

The tone changes immediately. Somewhere over the wires, there’s the squeak of Shane’s couch at his place, and Ryan images him leaning forward, imagines the way he’ll balance his elbows on his knees, brown eyes falling to the coffee table as he focuses in on Ryan on the other end and asks, “What’s up?”

And Ryan dissolves into another fit of coughing, pulling the phone away from his ear. Hard enough that his eyes water, He retches and there are more flower petals this time. They coat his tongue in a wrench of bile, and he spits them out onto the pavement.

“Ryan? Ryan… Ryan,” Shane saying into the phone. Ryan can hear him near his knees, tinny and far away. And he wants— fuck, he wants him… he doesn’t want to be alone. 

“Dude, can I come over there?” 

“Yeah, sure you can,” Shane says. “Are you okay?” 

“Yeah… I dunno, maybe, yeah.”

“Where are you?”

“I went to the doctor… um…”

“You okay to drive? I can go to yours.”

“Could you?” Ryan croaks, and he’s— god, he’s going to pretend it’s the coughing that’s got him here, sounding on the edge of tears, and not the fact that he actually is, that he might be. 

“Yeah. Yup, what do you need?” Shane asks. Immediately. _Immediately_. 

It grounds Ryan a little, until: _just you_ , Ryan thinks. “Just—” he can’t finish. He presses his palm to his forehead and feels this cold sweat and just… he doesn’t trust himself to speak.

“I’ll be there. I’m leaving now. You want me to pick you up?”

“No, I can drive. I’m leaving now, too.”

~°~

Ryan gets home before Shane arrives and makes his way back up the steps to apartment. He drinks some water like the doctor said to. He makes some oatmeal but can’t eat it so he watches it go stone cold on the kitchen counter until there’s a knock on his door.

Shane holds up a nylon bag of stuff. Ryan thinks that he must’ve made the speediest corner store pickup ever, but as Shane starts unloading stuff onto the counter he realizes it’s mostly from Shane’s place. Individual packets of Jell-O, chocolate pudding, strawberry, and lime. There’s tins of soup, Vitamin C tablets — the chewable ones that taste like oranges. There’s an unopened sleeve of saltines and, hilariously, a couple of cans of blueberry cider from a fancy brewery.

“Wow,” Ryan says, staring at it all.

“You sounded rough.” Shane leans his hip into the counter and looks at him and Ryan chews on his lower lip and then tells Shane what’s been happening. About the flower petals he’s been coughing up, about the doctor and what a waste of time that was. And Shane—

Shane is _angry_. Quietly angry like Shane always is when it’s real. He frowns at the saltines before he starts puttering around, putting things in places they don’t go. Places Ryan wouldn’t put them — crackers in the wrong cupboards, Jell-O next to the cereal. But he doesn’t say anything. He’s too tired to say anything, he just watches him. A packet tumbles from the cabinet where Shane put it and he shoves it back in again

“Whoa, settle down, tiger,” Ryan says. “What did Lime Jell-O ever do to you?”

“I dunno, man, that guy sounds like a quack. What a fucking waste of time.”

Ryan breathes a laugh, and a low “Yeah.”

“He couldn’t do _anything_ for you?”

“I don’t know if he _believed_ me.”

“Jesus,” Shane says. “Did you— well, do you want to go somewhere else? I’ll go with you, if you want.”

Ryan opens his mouth to say something and— instead of words he just coughs and coughs. It’s too gross, too much. When he pulls in a breath it sounds like he’s drowning and suddenly Shane’s hand is on his shoulder, cold but strong, squeezing a little and there’s a “Jesus, Ryan—” from somewhere above him. His heart flutters. He retches into the sink and nothing comes up but— he slips his fingers into his mouth and pulls a single damp flower petal from his tongue and forefinger, rolls it out across his thumb.

Shane says “That’s a violet,” and he sounds surprised, but also chill as hell in the way that only Shane can. When Ryan meets his eyes, though, Shane’s already looking at him, and it’s all confusion and worry. He holds Ryan’s eyes for a long moment, thumb sliding over his shoulder, over his collarbone. Somewhere, distant, unrelated to all of this, Ryan’s belly goes white hot. 

“Okay,” Shane says. “Should we go to ER?”

“I don’t know.” 

“I’ll go in with you. I’ll back you up.” Silence for a moment. “I mean I… I just watched you cough up a fucking flower petal.” His hand never leaves Ryan’s shoulder. 

Ryan rubs his throat and says, voice soft and urgent. “I don’t know. I don’t know, dude.” He moves away from that touch and feels the loss of it in his chest. It sits right were the pain does. He rinses his hand off. Shane watches him. Steady, too-tall Shane. Shane with his soft voice and careful hands and his being there when it counts. Ryan shuts his eyes tightly. “I dunno.” And suddenly he’s _furious_. Furious that the doctor dismissed him so readily, angry that he looked at him and figured that he just couldn’t be bothered with Ryan. He thinks he never would’ve let himself get angry about that if Shane hadn’t gotten angry on his behalf. He says “I really don’t want to sit in any more waiting rooms.”

“I hear you, buddy,” Shane says, “But…”

“Let’s just, um… can you stay? For a bit and… and if it gets worse, I’ll go. Is that… are you cool with that?”

“Are you cool with it?” Shane asks. 

Ryan meets his eyes and shrugs. “At least I know I’m not crazy.”

“Not about this one,” Shane says, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes.

~°~

They decide to make the Lime Jell-O and, in the meantime they watch movies they’ve both already seen and it’s nice. Eventually Ryan sleeps a little because he’d been awake most of the night. Every time he half wakes he can feel Shane on the other end of the couch with the afternoon sun in his hair, either on his phone or watching the movie in the laptop and that helps. It helps to know he’s not alone. 

He almost thinks everything’s going to be okay.

It’s after the Jell-O, after they crack open the blueberry ciders — because Ryan’s barely been coughing and he wants to see how disgusting it is (It’s not, it’s actually pretty good) — that he starts to feel bad again. When he coughs it’s accompanied by this horrible, pressure in the place where his ribs join, at the top of his stomach. It’s— like _pulling_ , almost, like— “Ohfuck,” Ryan says, and runs to the bathroom.

Ryan hates throwing up. He fucking _hates_ it, but at least, he thinks, he’ll feel better afterwards. Maybe this will get up whatever the fuck is inside him making him sick. Except when he retches, heaves over the water, what comes up is a slick, horrifying mass of something — something not liquid. And it catches until, like that scene from fucking Poltergeist II, Ryan’s got to reach into his mouth, past his teeth and pull something out. Something that wrenches from somewhere inside him, something that pulls until his lungs quiver and stutter, until his eyes aren’t just watering from the retching. He sits back with flowers in his hands. They’re pink, bell-shaped, and covered in saliva — like what they used to call snake spit as kids — the stuff you’d find in the early morning, covering the grass — little collections of white, foamy bubbles. That’s exactly what it looks like. And the flowers are— like he’d taken them from a vase and — like a sword swallower, slid them, delicate blossoms first, down his throat and into the cavity of his chest.

He’s crying before he knows it. He’s crying and then Shane is there — Shane’s hands on him, and on his hands, and he’s pulling the flowers, their stems, from Ryan’s fingers as though they haven’t just been vomited up. He drops them onto the floor between them and their eyes lock and—

“Jesus Christ,” Shane says, eyes liquid-dark. “Jesus Christ.”

Anyway, Ryan knows what Shane looks like when he’s afraid, now.

~°~

Of course, Shane wants them to go to emergency, but Ryan has already spent a cumulative eight hours in some waiting room for literally nothing at all this morning and he can’t bring himself to go again. And maybe there’s a small part of him that hopes that he’ll wake up and all of this will be a dream. ER feels real and terrifying.

So they stand together in the fading light of Ryan’s living room in a horrible, helpless kind of silence. 

“I hate to say this,” Shane says, finally, his voice soft, “but we’re going to have to Google it.”

~°~

So that’s what they do. Shane sits on his phone while Ryan scrolls through and through the computer looking up every variation of coughing and flowers and vomiting they can think of. It’s Shane who ends up looking up what kind of flower it is. 

They still have it — half-dried now and wrapped up in a kitchen towel. Shane takes pictures of it on an app (“Officially the weirdest fucking thing we’ve ever done,” Ryan says, sitting knee to knee and hip to hip with Shane on the couch while they go through the app's suggestions. None of them are exactly right. “It’s probably because it’s kind of mutilated now,” Ryan says. He pokes at it. The stem is almost stiff and that fact twists through his gut in a way that makes him have to deep-breathe until it passes. 

There’s no way he accidentally swallowed that. 

And eventually, they both find it, scrolling through photo after photo of pink flowers online at two in the morning. It’s pink heath. Shane looks it up — _Epacris impressa_. “This doesn’t even grow in the U.S.,” he says. “How the fuck…?”

Ryan aggressively rubs his hands over his face and leans over his knees.

Shane says, whisper-soft, “It’s okay,” but when Ryan raises his head looks at him, he’s frowning at the screen.

“Is it though? Like, what the fuck, dude…”

“I know, I dunno,” Shane says and meets his eyes. “It’s gonna be okay though. I swear, Ryan, really. This can’t be— you’re not a fucking medical anomaly. This has to’ve happened before. This has to be… I dunno, something, we just have to figure it out. You’re good at research, right? We’ll figure it out.” He scrubs his eyes with his fingertips and turns back to the laptop. 

Ryan takes a long, steadying breath. “Maybe— maybe it’s native to Japan? I started feeling like this a couple days after we came back. It's possible I somehow...” but he's grasping at straws, now, he thinks

But it isn’t native to Japan either. So that’s a dead end. But they start running things through a translator and searching Japanese websites but find nothing. At least not that they can decipher.

“What do you say we turn to good old Reddit?” Shane asks.

“You want to asks a message board about coughing up flowers?” 

Shane shrugs. “Can’t hurt, can it?”

~°~

And all of their research turns up nothing. It’s four in the morning when Ryan, who has thrown up twice more, each time, pulling hanks of flowers from behind his teeth, gagging over his hands as leaves stick against over the walls of his throat. and Shane sits with him on the bathroom floor with the phone, because maybe he feels fucking helpless otherwise.

Ryan almost falls asleep against the edge of the bathtub, when Shane nudges him with his ankle. “Hey buddy,” he says. “You should try to sleep, I think.”

“Mm,” Ryan murmurs, groggy and nearsighted without his glasses which are folded up on the bathroom counter where Shane placed them. There is a collection of heath in the plastic bathroom garbage like some kind of fucked up bouquet. 

“Are you going home?” Ryan asks in his room, a little more awake now he’s knocked his elbow off of his bedroom door sharply.

“No, I’m going to stay,” Shane says, “so budge over.”

And they’ve shared a bed before. At half a hundred hotels and haunted places, in so many different cities, and so Ryan doesn’t even question it. He doesn’t know how long they lie there before Shane falls asleep, and Ryan rolls over to face him on the mattress and tries not to think about how the burning feeling is worse now, and deeper. He tries not to think about how it all feels like it’s getting worse, and he lies with his eyes on Shane’s face.

 _What if I die?_ Ryan thinks. It’s the kind of thought you have in those impossibly dark hours that make morning feel impossible. Like the fantasies he has — the ones he lets himself have, sometimes — about Shane leaning into him at the pub in London and kissing him; or about Shane’s eyes meeting his through the ringing silence after a Spirit Box session and kissing him, even though the cameras are still running; or about Shane stopping Ryan before he can climb out of one of their rented cars in some rainy, mountainous forest somewhere and — god, and kissing him.

Sometimes he wants it so bad it makes him want to scream.

And sometimes he lets himself think about the thing that _did_ happen. That thing that happened in New Orleans, in the French Quarter at the Dauphine Orleans Hotel. Ryan was wired from ghost footsteps all night long, and Shane was being snappy and had this strained look in his eyes. Ryan remembers how he’d been sort of irritated, almost snappish:

 _“I-I dunno, Ryan, this place is_ strange _?”_

Ryan remembers meeting him back at their regular hotel, where Shane was still rainy-day soft, and sleep-pale, but calmer and Ryan thought it was just because Shane was annoyed at the fact that Ryan was still banging on about some of the most compelling evidence he thinks they’ve ever caught, but… he thinks, now, maybe it wasn’t that. Because there was a moment— one Ryan has played over a _thousand_ times in his head. If it were a cassette tape, he long ago would’ve worn the tape loose and soft, and it would’ve spilled itself all over the place. He doesn’t play it anymore, because it gets all snagged up in his brain until he can’t breathe, because—

Shane had gotten up for a bottle of water or something — Ryan doesn’t remember that part — just knows that he sat down at the edge of Ryan’s bed and reached out to take his wrist where Ryan scrolling through his phone and their eyes at met. And Shane had said “Ry, I—”

Something he doesn’t call him all that often. Something that makes Ryan’s heart feel molten.

And Shane had wet his lips and said “It’s not that I—, okay… last night…”

And Ryan’s brain had just been fucking _devoid_ of anything witty or clever because Shane’s eyes were dark dark dark, and his fingers were still around Ryan’s wrist, and he thought— surely he can feel my heartbeat there. He thought, _surely he can feel how fast it…?_

And maybe he could, because Shane had looked down at their hands and took this breath — the kind you take before you say something big, something life-altering. “D’you want a coffee?” he’d asked, and then, when Ryan had stammered out some kind of bemused yes, Shane had practically fled the room and he— sometimes he lets himself think that _that_ meant something.

But it was easier four fucking years ago. Nothing’s happened since then.

Except that whatever it is Ryan feels has gotten worse. Except that Shane’s the first person he thinks of calling whenever something goes wrong or right. Except that Shane’s the one who came over and brought a fucking care packet for fuckssake, and sat in emerge with him, and had his back and got angry in Ryan’s stead at the doctors’ incompetence. Except that Shane’s the one curled up in Ryan’s bed, promising to stay. 

Shane — god, Shane makes him feel… safe. Even when he’s scared as hell.

~°~

Ryan wakes up in time to roll over and vomit onto the floor beside his bed, and in the soft butter colour of morning he notices that the flower is different.

And there’s movement behind him, a shifting of the mattress and Shane’s saying “Fuck,” quiet and dismayed at first, and then with a darker edge: “Oh _fuck_ , Ryan.” He still has his contacts in. That’s what Ryan realizes, because whatever Shane’s looking at in horror Ryan can’t see until he reaches for his glasses and pushes them up his nose.

There are roots this time. This flower has roots, and at the ends of them are little twisted pieces of flesh. Pieces — Ryan realizes when he starts coughing up more petals and bits of leaves, and red droplets spray the hardwood — pieces of his lungs.

~°~

This type of flower is a Waratah. It curls in on itself — a hundred little petals protecting its heart. Ryan thinks it looks impossible.

As impossible as vomiting flowers. Flowers with pieces of his insides attached. 

Shane suggests ER again, but with a kind of hollowed-out tone that means he doesn’t think it will help. Ryan doesn’t either. They’re sitting at the table just off from the kitchen waiting for the coffee. Ryan only put it on to buy some time before he has to make a decision. Because they both know that ER won’t change anything; not for this.

So Ryan helps him. “You know,” he muses, “How in those ghost-hunting videos there're some things that are just so strange, so inexplicable, that people know it’ll be useless to call the cops?” He looks up to find Shane’s eyes on him, but Shane looks away when Ryan looks up, gaze falling out the window. “Like,” Ryan presses on, “How the sounds you hear are too strange, or too impossible—”

“You think this is _too impossible_ for ER?” Shane asks, looking back at him.

Ryan shrugs. “Yeah. Yeah, I kind of do. And so do you, Big Guy.” He presses his lips together and kind of smiles. _You can say it._

But Shane doesn’t know how to say it. Shane is too logical for all of this. He sighs and looks out the window and Ryan knows that Shane knows he’s right. “I hate this Ryan. I really fucking do.”

“I know.” And Ryan doesn’t know what to say. He just knows that he _can’t_ sit in ER just to be sent away like he was yesterday. Sometimes he thinks the healthcare system is set up just to dishearten people. And besides, he has a hunch now, an inkling that this is something else. The flowers keep changing, even though they seem to be consistent for a time. First violets, then pink heath… he says as much to Shane who presses his lips together and taps his fingers once against the tabletop. 

“The first ones, the one at the sink… that was a violet,” Shane says.

“How do you know that?”

“It’s the state flower of Illinois,” Shane says. “Common blue violet. We learned it in school. All the tourist shops have little—” he makes a vague hand gesture, _bric-a-brac_. “Trinkets and things with violets on them…” Their eyes meet and Shane rises his brows. “You don’t think…” he begins.

And that’s how they end up looking up the meanings of flowers. 

“Common blue violet,” Ryan reads, voice raw. He’s got a wastebasket beside him in case he’s sick. “Faith trustworthiness, affection, intuition and love.”

“None of this feels very loving,” Shane says, and Ryan actually cracks a smile as Shane scrolls quickly through his phone. “Pink heath, pink heath…” Shane mutters, before leaning into Ryan so he can reach the track pad, and Ryan feels his breath catch. He holds it, feeling his heart ratchet up. He doesn’t breathe so that he doesn’t cough. “I need an answer.”

“Well, _I_ don’t fucking know, man—”

“No that’s what it _means_. Victorian language of flowers, Pink heath, ‘I need an answer.’”

“Not helpful, Shane,” Ryan says, and when he reaches, brushing Shane’s hand from the laptop, Shane pulls his hand away sharply. Ryan freezes as a horrible thought occurs to him. He turns wide, dark eyes on Shane. “Shit,” he thinks, “D’you think it’s contagious?” 

“Don’t give me your Ghost Noise eyes, I think if it were, we’d’ve heard about it by now,” Shane says, with such steady, logical assurance, that Ryan has to admit to himself that that can’t be why he snatched his hand away as though Ryan had burned him.

“Okay, what’s the last one?” Shane asks.

“Uh… waratah…”

“Be brave,” Shane reads.

“Uh—” says Ryan. “So we have ‘faith’, ‘affection’, ‘gimmie answers’, and ‘be brave’… Not clear.”

“No, yeah,” Shane says. “No, it’s not…” but his eyes are on the screen like he’s seeing something beyond it.

~°~

Ryan’s sick again, and again before the day is through, and it twists Shane’s stomach like he’s the one who’s sick. It’s not even that he minds watching people throw up, he doesn’t. He just minds when it sounds as gut-wrenching as this does — pulling flowers from the depths of a person — he fucking _minds_ when it’s Ryan. 

And when Ryan finally crashes in exhaustion at the end of the couch, with the waste bin filled with leaves and roots and blossoms grotesque in their redness, and in the catches and snags of flesh on them like it’s been snagged in barbed wire. It makes Shane’s jaw hurt and he rubs his eyes and curses his contacts and not having the forethought to bring his glasses. He goes into Ryan’s bathroom and pokes around in the medicine cabinet until he finds contact solution. He takes them out to clean them, and then puts them back in and that helps, but only a little. He’s not about to go home and leave Ry— Ryan— here. 

And he goes back to the laptop on Ryan’s coffee table, plugs it into the wall when the battery warning pops up. He sits with his elbows on his knees, fingers locked beneath his chin and thinks about how there was something he didn’t read in the meaning of waratah.

Clicking back through the old web pages until he finds it on a website called Victorian Language of Flowers. 

**Waratah ( _Telopea speciosissima_ )**  
_· Be brave;_  
_· I..._  


And… oh.

Shane takes a deep breath and turns his head to look at Ryan curled up on the other end of the couch, his brow furrowed even in sleep. Careful, he reaches out and wraps his fingers around Ryan’s bare ankle, above his sock and holds on. He’s warm — not feverish warm, but definitely warm and Shane thinks Okay, and feels his stomach swoop with fear.

“ _Fuck_ ,” he whispers.

Only a little while later, Shane thinks that curses don’t always come from where you’d expect. They don’t need to be created or cast. Sometimes they just find a person, or a group of people, to teach them something. Sometimes, they facilitate change. ‘Apocalypse’ Shane thinks, which has to be one of the worst, and widespread kinds of curses originally meant _revelation_ , not _catastrophe_.

But it’s not like he didn’t know already. It’s just that, before it was a question of etymology and not a reality. Before, his best friend wasn’t literally coughing up pieces of his himself like the plants are growing into his lungs.

And anyway, didn't Ryan say about a thousand times that spiritual energy was just stronger in older countries?

_I started feeling like this a couple days after we came back..._

The thing about curses too, Shane thinks, is that you can break them and honestly, maybe the answer is right here in front of him. Not just in the blue violet petal spread over Ryan’s thumb, or in the pink heath he pulled from his throat, and not in the wastebasket full of red. Maybe it’s in Ryan himself. Maybe it’s in Shane.

~°~

“Ry. Ryan, wake up.”

Ryan makes a sound, a mumbled _hmmg?_ and squints at Shane through the white-glow of his laptop in the dark room. 

Shane says, I’m going to turn this light on,” and does and Ryan squeezes his eyes shut against the glow.

“Jesus. What time is it?”

“Late. Or early, maybe, I'm not sure. How are you feeling?”

Ryan inhales and feels that awful burning. Exhales and feels it even worse. “Same,” he breathes, and pushes himself to sitting. Shane sits down next to him with a glass of water that he pushes into Ryan’s hands, and Ryan’s halfway through a murmured thanks when Shane presses his fingers to his forehead.

“Am I hot?”

Shane laughs. “I mean, yeah.”

There’s a beat, when it lands awkwardly and Ryan doesn’t know if Shane’s saying _Yeah, you have a fever, you idiot_ , or if he’s saying _You’re hot._

“Listen,” Shane says, “Ry.” 

And Ryan wants to, but he’s coughing again, coughing blood and petals and fuck they taste so bitter. He would honestly rather throw up. And Shane’s hand settles on the back of his neck. Shane’s hand runs over his hair until Ryan catches his breath and wipes blood from his mouth and—

And Shane kisses him.

It’s a bit of a mess. Ryan jerks back instinctively, and their teeth knock once, and Shane’s mouth, when he opens it against Ryan’s _doesn’t_ taste bitter, it tastes like Ryan’s tap water and like— like Shane, he guesses. He figures _he_ tastes like blood. So that sucks. Ryan gasps softly anyway, and then draws back sharply to cough again, but it’s somewhere else — not that deep-chest cough he’s had for days upon days, it’s only in his throat, where his breath hitched.

And something in Shane’s eyes is simultaneously dark as deserts at night and lit like lanterns. “Ryan, listen,” Shane says. “You know I…”

Ryan watches him swallow, watches him struggle with something and his own heart starts jackrabbiting in his _throat_ and _Oh, god_ , Ryan thinks, with a flicker of panic, _don’t give out on me yet._ “Shane?” he croaks.

“Yeah. Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” Ryan breathes. _Breathes_. Absently, he rubs his palm over his chest, eyes fixed on Shane’s. “You. Kissed me.”

“Yeah, I. Yeah. I kissed you.”

“Oh… let’s really hope it’s not contagious,” Ryan says.

“It’s not contagious,” Shane whispers and reaches for his hand, takes it.

Ryan's mind is going to fucking melt. “Are you— is this like a… a fairy tale kind of shtick that you’re pulling here?” Ryan asks. God, his chest expands, cool air pours into his lungs, rain on parched earth.

“Yeah,” Shane says, dead serious. “Yeah, I’m waiting for you to turn from a weird, beady-eyed frog into a beautiful lady.”

Ryan doesn’t know which of them starts smiling first, but all at once they’re both hysterically laughing, and Ryan doesn’t cough. Not even once.

“Listen,” Shane says, when they’ve collected themselves, “I think I’ve worked it out.”

“What’s that?”

And Shane lets him go and Ryan flexes his fingers through the air in his absence. Shane reaches for the laptop and pulls it onto his knees. “Waratah,” Shane reads. “ _Telopea speciosissima_ means ‘be brave’ and…” and his eyes rise to Ryan’s, take his own breath. “And ‘I love you completely.’”

And slowly the pieces begin to fall together in Ryan’s head, as unbelievable as they all are — but then, he’s never been the skeptic.

The state flower of Illinois, where Shane is from.

The heath, pink and painful in his throat, sticking like the 'I love you' he couldn’t ever bring himself to say out loud, not the way he wanted to say it, where it meant something other than 'as friends'. _I need an answer_. The question of course being 'do you love me the way that _I—_ '

Waratah. Red and curled upon itself, protecting its heart.

But you can't live like that. Ryan knows that. You can't live if you only ever put up walls. You have to open up sometimes, for the right people. For the right things. And Shane was the one who figured out how to do that. How to say 'I love you' and have it mean _I love you completely_.

“Oh,” Ryan says, so so soft. “Oh, well. I guess... me too.” _I guess_ , he thinks, and marvels at how language is so wildly inaccurate sometimes. How it doesn’t always convey exactly what someone means. Maybe that’s why someone invented the language of flowers. Something to be planted, cared for, and given. Offered as a message, or a promise.

And Shane smiles at Ryan like morning, and when he wraps him up in his arms, Ryan feels every fragment, every piece of their friendship, of their love, holding fast. 

And maybe it’s different, now, changed and shifted. They can’t go back to how it was before but— “Your arms are too long,” Ryan says, and Shane laughs a little brokenly against his shoulder.

~°~

“So what do we call this?” Ryan asks. It is days later, and Shane has barely left his side. They shuttle between his place and Ryan’s. They touch each other at the wrists, the small of the back, at the throat. They tangle their fingers in one another’s fingers and one another's hair and kiss and kiss sometimes until they run out of breath, until they're gasping. But there's been no more flowers.

“I guess we could call it dating,” Shane says, loping along beside him on their way back from getting breakfast takeout at the place down the street.

“Jesus, somehow that doesn’t live up to _I love you completely_.”

And Shane laughs, eyes crinkled up at the corners and oh _christ_ , Ryan loves him.

“Be my boyfriend,” Shane tells him. “Be my partner. We’re there anyway, aren’t we?”

“You know what I always thought sounded cool and mysterious?” Ryan asks, and his heart flutters as Shane touches his shoulder, leans into him to steal some of his iced coffee from his straw. “— careful or I’ll skewer you — ‘gentleman caller.’”

“ _Absolutely_ not.”

Ryan cackles. “All right,” he says, “I’ll be your boyfriend,” and he’s beaming so hard his face hurts. “Just don’t buy me any flowers. Ever.”

**Author's Note:**

> The use of madder and narcissus at the Urgent Care clinic have maybe not-so-hidden meanings, too.
> 
> This heath care visit was based loosely off of several experiences that I (and I'm sure many other people have had, if they are anything other than a white male) when they are treated by white male doctors. 
> 
> Narcissus means, of course, narcissism, while madder signifies an inflated ego. 
> 
> ~
> 
> I am aware of the similarity of my title and [**Common Woodbrown**](https://archiveofourown.org/works/927712) by imochan (which is BRILLIANT, and if you ship wolfstar you should definitely go read it). This was unintentional. I also don't feel like a common blue violet is representative of Shane in the way that he would like (Mr wheat back penny), but I STRUGGLED to name this piece.
> 
> find me on tumblr @[ **liminalweirdo**](https://liminalweirdo.tumblr.com)!


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